[Justin Pasternak]

I'm making an interactive flash project on why I like Medieval Knights. I'm having a bit of trouble trying to explain why "I like Medieval Knights" and what they mean to me?

So, what I'm asking is what exactly do you all like about knights?

1. What do you like about their armor?

2. What do you like about their weaponry?

3. What do you like about their battle tactics/fighting skills?

4. What aspects of the Medieval Knight (the man-at-arms - the knight's military role and/or the gentry - the knightly social class) intrigues you the most?

[Felix Wang]

In addition to numbers 1,2, and 3, the answers to #4 are extremely important. I suspect that it is difficult to separate the social/literary values from the physical gear of the knight. Chivalry, in all its aspects, is hugely important in defining some people's interest in knights.

[B. Stark]

Romanticism aside, armor, from all it's forms during the "Middle Ages", impresses me by the skill and diligent handwork it would take to make a full suit of mail. 100,000 links +/- is truly amazing. Let alone the resiliency of mail and the length of it's use. Plate armor as well is fascinating in the skill and creative imagination employed to make it. Up to the masterpieces of the High Gothic style armors of the late 15th century. amazing metal work that we just really can't duplicate, though some come close.

Weaponry as well, though the sword is the most identifiable weapon of the knight, were amazing medieval engineering technology. Rife with symbology as well and tied directly to a knight's faith, if only metaphorically, and this feature became less common as the years wore on. Not to mention the variety of swords, and the versatilty of the weapon itself. For close hand to hand combat a sword is very hard to beat, especially when lightly armored or without armor. Of course the gun wrote the epitaph for swords as the "king of weapons". Other weapons such as maces, axes and the like have their own appeal. All of them from the simple to the more complex are awe inspiring for their proportions, volumes and overall aesthetics.


For me the level of dedication to hand weapon skills(which was an absolute necessity) is overall impressive. though esoteric in a sense in this modern age, it just has that draw of the ability to stand toe to toe against someone who intends you harm with sharp steel. A very intangible and hard to desribe notion. For me least ways.

All of Medieval Society intrigues me! The nobility, the clergy, and in many ways mores so the peasant and non-noble middle or land owning classes. They did not think like you and I. Their appreciations were in amny ways removed from our daily concerns of the modern age. For the knightly class, their suppossed smug and disregarding attitude about facing death in battle...all in a nutshell.

[Lafayette C Curtis]

#3: I'm mostly fascinated by the way they preserved Roman concepts and institutions and modified them to fit the changing conditions of warfare. Their method of warfare was no less sophisticated than most other eras in European history, and the image of them as tactically unimaginative brutes is just a biased picture painted by Renaissance and Victorian authors. Some of them did lack tactical sense but other historical periods (and regions) also had their equivalent share of inept tacticians.

#4: Well...the way they relate to the social and military landscape of medieval Europe at large. I'm afraid this subject is so broad that there's no way for me to expound on it adequately here.

BTW, you have to be clear about what you mean by "knight." Is it the gentry--that is, the knightly social class in general? Is it the man-at-arms--the knight's military role? Or is it the strict institutional definition of "knight?"

[Jared Smith]

[Lafayette C Curtis]